I had heard quite a few times over the years, the wish for greater integration with Desktop / Workstation computers within the home. Things like:

* Being able to start a piece of media on a workstation, or move a piece of media between a TV and Workstation, on eitheHar an orbiter, or the file manager* Having a convienient orbiter available on a workstation to do the above, or control other house functions* Having a way to turn the monitor on/off automatically, in response to changes in house mode (when going Away for example, or waking up, or presence detection)

etc.

I have put together a quick prototype of this, and it is in SVN in a few pieces, for those interested in finishing development of such a component.

No, I am not putting up instructions on the wiki of how to install the components, why? Because I want to foster development within here, and discussion, to force the issue towards making it easily installable, rather than letting setup instructions languish on a wiki that people just muddy through.

yes, but it's meant for desktop machines that already have existing environments.

The end goal is to have an installable package on Windows, Linux, and mac, that doesn't interfere with the existing stuff, just maps LinuxMCE stuff to file types, and provides a media end point. It is NOT meant to be a full media director package.

So just to make sure I've got it correct, this will be an extremely lightweight version of say, running an MD on virtual machine platform in a Windows (etc...) environment, except it'll run a lot faster, have more features, be more integrated with a smaller footprint? Sounds awesome! If you'd except a VB.net program I'd like to be involved (I know this isn't the case).

The point of the workstation agent, is simply to allow workstations to be able to participate in the LinuxMCE home. It is NOT meant as a substitute for media directors, in that:

(1) there is no ConfirmDependencies, so no automatic package installation(2) the feature set is very fixed. This is intentional, many features of LinuxMCE require tight control of the target system, so many things will have to be omitted.

Unfortunately i'm a beginner in programming and therefore no big help.In addition i think i'm learning the wrong language for this project but that brings me to the point: Why don't you use Java?It would run on all three mentioned platforms without compiling and stuff.